


MATCHING

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-31
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-28 14:40:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Pagbis/Noggenfoggerpot as a pinch-hit for dragonageholidaycheer. They don't all go their separate ways, and so find themselves in the Anderfels one winter. <i>Of all the places they could have gone, Hawke thought—Llomerryn with Isabela was merely one example, its bonfires burning on the shore and whiskey-brown spirits burning even brighter; Orlais with Aveline, where they could overburden the infamous horses after eating too much of the equally infamous cheeses; even somewhere elvhen would have been preferable, a vacation planned entirely by Merrill, with no one allowed proper footwear in true Dalish fashion—they had to find themselves in the Anderfels, amidst the bald mountains, amongst its bald people.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	MATCHING

Of all the places they could have gone, Hawke thought—Llomerryn with Isabela was merely one example, its bonfires burning on the shore and whiskey-brown spirits burning even brighter; Orlais with Aveline, where they could overburden the infamous horses after eating too much of the equally infamous cheeses; even somewhere _elvhen_ would have been preferable, a vacation planned entirely by Merrill, with no one allowed proper footwear in true Dalish fashion—they _had_ to find themselves in the Anderfels, amidst the bald mountains, amongst its bald people.

Presumably its bald people.

Hawke hadn’t, technically, seen many of them.

‘Not _bald_ ,’ he added, for Anders’s sake—or rather, for the sake of Anders’s high and noble brow. ‘You know, Anders, sometimes I have no idea why I say these things. So—where _are_ your countrymen?’

But they were all in hiding in their little houses, also presumably, heads resting upon their little pillows, avoiding their not-so-little snow and even-less-little sleet, the stark and driving winds and the drifts and the gusts, the chills the locals lived with all their lives. They were the same chills Anders had been born into—the same chills that explained everything.

‘Well,’ Hawke said, ‘at least it isn’t Orzammar.’

‘Speak for yourself, Hawke,’ Varric replied, all bundled into his brand new cloak with generous fur trim. It made him look handsome, even handsomer than it made _Hawke_ look, and that was their first problem. If only they didn’t all match—like members of the same acting troupe fallen on hard times and even harder luck, or members of a family dressed alike by one well-intentioned and prodigiously intrepid _seamstress_ of a mother. _It was a deal, Hawke_ , Varric explained. _Remember that thing called ‘coin’ we need to get by? ‘Cause there’s no expeditions into the Deep Roads to make up for lack of it here._ Matching cloaks it was, Hawke decided a moment later, and there they all were, marginally more warm. ‘Orzammar’s not _so_ bad—if you don’t mind all the dwarves.’

‘That’s like saying Tevinter isn’t so bad if you don’t mind all the slavers,’ Hawke said.

‘And why would we say a thing such as that,’ Fenris agreed.

They _did_ look fetching with their white fur lining and thick woolen cowls, all caught equally by the sudden tug from the mountain wind; a tuft tickled the stubble at Anders’s chin but he didn’t bother to shrug it away, which meant Hawke had to elbow him closer to the fire.

It was an action that might have resembled ‘accident’—to anyone who _hadn’t_ known him for over seven long and admittedly frustrating years.

His friends wore matching cloaks _and_ matching expressions. They never fussed or fretted when Hawke slid away from the firepit to give someone else his place of honor because they’d long since given up on trying—which was, Hawke had come to understand, what friendship and affection truly meant: surrender, one pained sigh followed by broken acceptance, the realization that they could no more change Hawke than they could make him funnier, or more appropriate, or less attractive when he donned a leather jerkin, or less embarrassing on social occasions.

‘Asking for more cheese is _not_ an embarrassing question,’ Hawke had tried to explain. ‘Certainly not for me. At least it’s a common one. Everybody does it, _especially_ the king of Ferelden.’

‘That’s true—but you _did_ ask a duke while he was being glove-slapped by a chevalier,’ Anders had replied.

So _that_ was why they were no longer in Orlais with its infamous horses groaning under their infamous and half-digested cheeses.

Those were good days. Now, they were good memories.

Hawke thought about them as they made camp for the night—no Anders to trouble save for the one whose troubles Hawke liked to think he shared—and one bedroom between them, one common tent.

‘Now, Varric,’ Hawke said. ‘Try not to speculate all the ways in which I am a _Champion_ at warming a natural Anders up. Leave that to Isabela—she’s so good at it.’

‘I think I’m supposed to resent that,’ Varric said.

‘But how can you, when he’s so _right_?’ Isabela asked. For Hawke, she reserved one last offering, a ‘Try the oils this time; they worked _so_ well on Fenris,’ and Fenris coughed not with discomfort, perhaps simply to remind them all he was still there.

There were more of them than Hawke could have imagined at one time; almost all of them, in fact. He might have done all right with only Anders—Varric would have improved matters exponentially, because he gave such excellent footrubs and did his best not to comment on the gray in Hawke’s beard, sticking to the calluses right under his nose—but it was their laughter that followed Hawke under the flap of the tent, their warmth he enjoyed and _not_ the firepit’s.

He played that one close to the chest.

Varric had still figured it out _years_ ago.

Now there was the matter of Anders to contend with, Anders who drew warmth not from firepit _or_ people, but from purpose—and also _person_ , _a_ person, in the singular. It was a separate phenomenon.

Hawke had figured _that_ out more recently than he cared to admit.

They couldn’t all share Varric’s giant chin and keen interpersonal insights. They couldn’t all share his chest hair, either, which Hawke mourned more frequently than anything else.

‘You called my people balding,’ Anders said, hand stilled on a pillow. _His_ pillow, in fact; a little pillow to stand against his not-so-little snow. And that didn’t take into consideration the wind and the drifts and the gusts, the landscape itself a single shade of _ice_ this unpleasant time of year, bare branches and distant mountain mist.

Lothering would have been all mud, a few darkspawn bones, possibly an ogre skull or two, scattered snowbanks and no sign of old fires scorching weary earth. Not finding the memories you were looking for made things so much better—but also so much _worse_.

‘And then I called myself an idiot,’ Hawke said. ‘…More or less. It was implied. And I _thought_ it was accepted.’

‘Accepted,’ Anders agreed.

Actually, Hawke decided, it was an unpleasant word.

‘Lavished,’ he suggested. ‘Adored. Fondly tolerated below the flames of that adoration.’

‘You have too much Varric in your diet,’ Anders told him—and there was the smile, somewhere in a patch of stubble at the corner of his mouth, stoked like the embers in the pit until they acquiesced to burn their hottest.

Anders turned down Hawke’s corner of the bedroll and Hawke turned down Anders’s. When he knelt past the pillow his knee creaked at the same moment Anders twisted a sore joint into popping in his back. It made a sort of music. Hawke laughed. He settled in, opening his arm and his chest and his attractive leather jerkin to whatever might settle next to him—with more warmth than the snow settled, hopefully, and with the right direction of drift.

‘Now,’ Hawke said, to replace the wrong memories with the right ones, ‘tell me again how you tied _all_ those sheets together to escape the tower, Anders. It’s my favorite bedtime story.’

‘And yet you always get it wrong,’ Anders replied, words against Hawke’s pulse. ‘They weren’t _just_ sheets. …There were smallclothes in that rope, too.’

‘Smalls are so much sturdier than linens,’ Hawke said.

Anders sighed. ‘I learned _that_ too late, didn’t I?’

*

When they passed some of the locals some few days later, two children wearing matching cloaks and carrying matching pillows, Hawke gave them their last sovereign without telling Varric. ‘I have no idea where it went,’ he explained, one of their thousand friendly lies, the same as _they all went their separate ways._

 **END**


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